Gross Skin-Looking Thing Found In Vitamin Water

By consumerist.comNovember 13, 2007

Jenny writes:

I was just drinking a bottle of Vitamin Water and there was a really gross thing in it. Industrial byproduct? Paper? Human skin? (See attached photos) Any ideas as to how I can figure out what the thing is and if its contact with my tongue is going to kill me? I have emailed the company.

What the heck is that thing?! Another picture, held aloft to the light, inside…

That’s disgusting. I buy a case of Vitamin Water from Costco every two or three weeks (ok, so I buy two cases every two or three weeks), and last week I grabbed a bottle and headed out to class. In class, I pulled it out of my backpack, placed it on the table, then noticed that it was only just under the date stamp!! It was still sealed, but I figured if it tasted weird at all, I’d dump it. It did (it was really bitter), and I dumped it. I’ve gone through countless cases of Vitamin Water this year alone, and that one disgusting bottle was enough for me to stop buying cases and start buying bottles on sale, just so I could inspect them first.

Oh. The. Horror. Any chance it’s a sheet of slime mold? Something that may have built up in the processing equipment? Do you have a local college or university with a biologist who might be curious as well?

If i ever saw that in a product I would NEVER buy it again no matter what they said it was. I have never drank Vitamin Water because…well I’d rather just have plain water and get my Vitamins the old fashion way via Food..after seeing this I will never sample it if given the chance. Nasty!

My guess is it’s the remains of whatever medication the victim ingested right before deciding to blow their cash on the grand-daddy of marketing scams (bottled water – oh, but this has vitamins! (so does Captain Crunch)). Jeezus people, catch a clue!

ummm… this i really weird but I have got a bottle of vitamin water that I kept just in case i died after drinking it.

It is a different brand from the label in the pic but has a similar problem.

I drank half the bottle in the car and then got disgusted with my mouth full of what felt like soggy toilet paper. I spit it all out. There was crap in the bottle. When i got back to the car after work all the crap was gone – weird. It was warm in the car tho. I kept the bottle for a week and then the crap returned and is now taking on a color suspicously close the the stuff in the picture. There is a giant clump in there now.

What is this crap? I could send a photo to the poster if you give me an email, still have the bottle.

gc3160thtuk says you got your humor in my sarcasm and you say you got your sarcasm in my humorsays:

apparently soylent green is vitamin water. Actually though I tend to agree with another poster saying it was slime. My aunt has one of those water dispensers and if she doesn’t clean it out on a regular basis it gets some junk like that in the innards of the dispenser. Blechh either way though. To the slime shiyat and to vitamin water. I prefer plain tap water.

That’s totally a fungal/bacterial Pellicle. Basically, your drink was contaminated/tainted with a bunch of microbes which went bananas eating the sugars in your VW, and grew like crazy on the surface of the liquid where the oxygen concentration would be greatest. Kinda like making Kombucha – Vitamin Watercha?

I seriously doubt it’s human flesh. Skin (of the sparsely-pigmented variety) gets that crayola-typical pink/peach flesh color from capillaries carrying oxygenated blood through it. If you’ve ever had skin come off (say, after a sunburn), you know that the surface layers of skin really aren’t pink at all — especially not the color shown in the photographs here. This is true for skin immediately removed from the body — imagine also flesh that’s been removed long enough to have gone through packaging and sat sealed in a bottle for many weeks, where it would have rapidly lost any life-like color shown here.

I have two hypotheses as to what it might be:
1) Some unmixed portion of the ingredients (e.g. cornsyrup and flavoring powder, as SOhp101 mentioned) — although I was unable to find the ingredients online to make a more specific guess, or
2) A by-product of the bottling / manufacturing process: e.g. glue, lubricant, or insulation of some sort.

@Falconfire: See ObtuseGoose‘s comment. But yeah, I’m very relieved I’m not the only trekkie who thought of that. [And neither of you get to deny being a trekkie, your comments in this thread prove otherwise.]

As previous commenters have suggested, this is almost certainly a bacterial slime – very similar to a mother of vinegar. As the bacteria feed on the nutrients in the vitamin water, they produce a carbohydrate support system, which forms the odd looking membrane. Although the bacteria that make old wine into vinegar are mostly harmless, there can be no guarantee that this particular slime contains only harmless bacteria, or indeed only bacteria – as a previous poster noted, it could well also support fungi.

So, Ben, now that you’ve grossed us all out, is Consumerist going to help Jenny get that thing to a lab somewhere for testing? Because otherwise it’s sort of like that woman with her acidic flip-flops. Wild speculation (and victim bashing) are not as helpful to other consumers as discovering the actual issue at hand and encouraging the company to address it is.

@brainologist:
I tend to think it was option A, some kind of congealed ingredients that happened to look like a chunk of corpse.

For those who think it is a slime mold, it wasn’t floating on top of the beverage or stuck to the cap like that. I drank about the half the bottle and was chugging away, when all of a sudden that thing was stuck to my tongue. I stuck it on the lid because it was the closest surface. Does that change your analysis?

The only other possibility I see is that it might have been a cardboard-ish seal that was under the lid. It could have fallen out, into the drink, and marinated there for quite some time. I think the folks who say it’s a bacterial film are probably right, though.

@cloudedice:
That’s exactly what they asked me to do! When I told them “Hell no!” they sent me two coupons for free bottles of Vitamin Water. (Which I will NOT use. Ew.)
I decided not to pursue it further because I wasn’t injured by the Gross Thing other than the loss of a bottle of Vitamin Water, so a lawsuit would probably be pretty fruitless.

The position of the slime within the liquid isn’t particularly relevant to the identification of the object as a slime or pellicle. While a pellicle, almost by definition, forms as a surface layer, slimes can form as sheets or streamers within the liquid, float to the top, sink to the bottom, or retain approximately neutral buoyancy.

Additionally, the location of the object upon purchase/consumption has little relationship to the position of formation – it is highly possible that the object formed as a surface layer, and was subsequently subsumed into the liquid by agitation upon handling and shipping.

There’s an easy way to test and see if it’s alive — remove a part of it, put it in a nutrient-rich environment, and see if you get more of it. If it grows, then it’s probably bacteria. If it stays the same (and doesn’t die!) then it’s probably not alive.

Dammit, I was going to say Flukeman…argh…I would like to point out that Vitamin Water is not loaded with artificial sweeteners or corn syrup, still, it is a great medium for growing bacteria.

I think if you put a call into your local college someone in the science department can at least point you in the right direction for a testing lab. That being said, if you plan to sue, it might be test to talk to a lawyer first. Taking it yourself to a lab might damage your case.

I was drinking a bottle of Coke’s alternative to Gatorade (can’t remember the name), got about half way through chugging it and noticed some cloudy, transparent masses hovering at the bottom. I immediately stopped drinking. Called Coke and they asked me to send it to them for testing. I got a report back that it was some sort of anaerobic mold. I considered some sort of legal action because whether by psychosomatic or real effect, my throat burned the rest of the day and I felt sick, but no lasting damage that I’m aware of. One co-worker with a degree in biology said it’s probably no worse than any of the other mold we ingest without knowing it.

and i don’t drink vitamin water for the vitamins. i drink it when i want a sweet beverage and there’s no real juice around. unlike, say, gatorade, vitamin water isn’t sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. it’s also not as sweet as a lot of sweet beverages, and i like that.

Wow, if the empty calories and sugars didn’t already turn you off from vitamin water this should definitely do the trick. That’s quite disgusting! I stay away from it all together – when you read the label you realize that it’s not the “healthy” beverage that it claims to be.

it looks like, once upon a time it was a paper seal on the inside of the lid, but I don’t think that vitamin Water uses those kinds of things…
The sludge that builds in the top of the orange ones is almost as disturbing though…

I googled “slime swallowed in vitamin water” and found this post. I bought a bottle and while driving in the dark,. I took two big swigs and on the second swallow, blahhhh. Something was in my mouth, adhering to my mouth. I couldn’t spit it out and had to take my fingers and scoop around and swat it out, half gaging… still driving. Ewww, totally gross. When I got to my destination, it was finally light and I examined the bottle. It held a ball of slime that didn’t disapate when shaken. Parts were cloudy and some sections were more clear. It is the size of about a golf ball that is almost suspended (doesn’t quickly fall to the bottom when you flip the bottle over) Again, ew! Makes you wonder what we put in our bodies without knowing. Anyone else find slime?